JON CARROLL -- Unfinished Business

Published 4:00 am, Thursday, August 29, 1996

WE ARE MAKING progress on several fronts, but we have not achieved our goal. The wheels of research grind slowly. Also, research is not exactly the forte of this space.

A magazine called up to offer me a free-lance assignment. "I warn you," said the editor, "it will require a little research."

"No problem," I said. "I own a dictionary."

On the "be kind to your web-footed friends" lyrics, origin of same, we have poked and prodded. We have listened to guesses proffered by well-meaning people also not involved in heavy source-checking. Tom Lehrer? Homer & Jethro? Mitch Miller?

Mitch Miller did sing it at the end of his television show. (Kids, in America there used to be a show called "Sing Along With Mitch." Your parents have not told you about it because they are wrapped in shame. If you want to make them crazy, just mention the show. They'll deny that they ever sang back to their TV sets, but they may very well be lying.)

But the lyrics are far older than that; they're almost of the nature of a camp song. Susan Suttle (not to be confused with Susan Subtle) did an online data search and came up with "web-footed friends" as BMI work No. 001622419, written by one D. Klieber.

The listing of all of D. Klieber's works, however, makes it reasonably clear that he was an entrepreneur who claimed authorship for hundreds of public domain songs. So there the mystery sits, awaiting further elucidation.

In the area of mystery song lyrics, the wonderful Naomi Wise offered an even deeper conundrum, the precise origin of "Found a Peanut."

"As I recall," she writes, "the final verse refers to some mode of reincarnation and the recurrence of the vicious goober cycle with the discovery of a peanut by a new avatar of leguminous victimhood."

Leguminous victimhood -- that's my excuse from now on.

ALAS, not much more progress was made by this space in its attempts to eat the perfect blueberry pie. That's because my blueberry pie person was unavailable for real-life reasons. I could have gone elsewhere, but this space is not a slut.

I did get numerous brochures from the North American Blueberry Council (916-933-9399 -- they love to chat). The blueberry is in the same botanical family as heather, flowering azalea and mountain laurel. The commercial blueberry is a hybrid of wild highbush blueberries and wild lowbush blueberries. About 307 million pounds of blueberries were processed in 1995; 47 percent of that total was "shipped to the fresh market."

Residents of Maine and Alaska checked in with their opinions that commercial blueberries were indistinguishable from rubber bathtub appliances, alleging that a human could not be said to have lived until he or she had tasted a wild blueberry. One Alaskan described quarreling with a grizzly bear over a particularly tasty patch, but you know how Alaskans go on.

One reader had an additional observation: Blueberries make wonderful cat toys.

FINALLY, in regard to my column on multiple phone bills, I got a nice note from Deep Tone at the Public Utilities Commission saying that I may have been the victim of a process called "slamming," which is having one's long-distance carrier changed without one's knowledge or consent.

Those who think they may have been slammed can call PUC slam-busters Larry McNeely at (415) 703-1836 or Wilson Lewis at (415) 703-2071.

And, it turns out, AT&T has just been slapped around by the PUC for the very multiple billing practices I cited. If that's happening to you and if you want your charges all on one Pac Bell bill, call AT&T at (800) 697-4056, ext. 11986, and tell them to eliminate the pointless paperwork, yours and theirs.